Yahoo is releasing a new type of paid search advertising that enables advertisers to include images and videos in the paid listings.

Called Rich Ads in Search, Yahoo will initially charge a monthly fee for the service, but may later move to the traditional auction-based, pay-per-click pricing of its text-based ads. Currently, the program is only open to certain large, brand-focused advertisers which have existing commercials or logos, such as Pedigree, SoBe and Pepsi and Home Depot.

Yahoo claims that advertisers participating in its pilot Rich Ads in Search program achieved click-through rates of up to 25 percent, although ad agency Razorfish saw less significant results, with 5 to 10 percent increases in click-through rates compared with regular text based ads.

I wondered whether the inclusion of a lot of rich media ads might clutter up the search results, thereby detracting from the Yahoo search experience. Although there are only a few participants in the program now, this seems unfounded… for now.

Here’s a search I did on ‘Pedigree’ which gives you an indication of how the rich media results will look:

Source: Stephanie Clifford, “Yahoo Shows Search Ads With Images and Video,” The New York Times, February 18, 2009

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 at 11:35 pm and is filed under News and Comment, Search Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.